Senior Engineering Manager, Starter Onboarding

About the Role: Senior Engineering Manager, Starter Onboarding

Change.org is actively seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Starter Onboarding team. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in designing, validating, and scaling the petition creation workflow, leveraging AI and experimentation to empower individuals to drive meaningful change globally. You will report directly to the VP of Engineering.

As a key leader within our Starter Onboarding team, you will focus on scaling the AI petition creation workflow to significantly boost successful petition launches. This requires close collaboration with Product, Design, and various cross-functional teams to ensure that technical execution is seamlessly aligned with our overarching business goals.

Change.org is a public benefit company, recognized as the world's largest social change platform. We empower over 100 million users, facilitating the launch of over 40,000 campaigns monthly, sustained by a 100% user-generated revenue model. Our platform sees a campaign victory every hour, working towards a world where creating change is an everyday reality and no one feels powerless. We are just beginning this journey and invite you to contribute to our mission.

Our platform has been a catalyst for major global movements, from mobilizing over 5 million people to investigate Amazon fires to nearly 3 million against war and famine in Yemen, and supporting large-scale mobilizations for Iran, against the war in Ukraine, and advocating for Racial Justice in the US. Countless local, national, and international victories occur daily, thanks to the collective power of our members. We are committed to amplifying their impact further, and your expertise is crucial to achieving this.

Key Outcomes

• Scale out our AI petition creation workflow to increase the number of successful petitions.
• Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, and other partners to define goals, prioritize work, and ensure seamless alignment between technical implementation and business outcomes.
• Provide technical influence, guidance, and feedback to team members, leveraging deep expertise to mentor and coach them effectively, contributing to the overall growth and success of the teams.
• Support the growth of engineers through coaching, regular feedback, and thoughtful career development, enabling strong performance across levels and specializations.
• Identify opportunities to improve development processes and workflows, implementing changes that reduce friction, enhance team productivity, and ensure adherence to best practices.
• Participate in our on-call rotation.

Core Competencies

0 -> 1 Product Execution

• A bias towards movement and experimentation in delivering product.
• Experience with turning ambiguity into iterative prototypes, leveraging AI tooling for rapid concept validation.
• Close collaboration with Product and Design partners to set goals, measure outcomes, and ship quickly.

Communication & Collaboration

• Communicate proactively and effectively with executive leadership, product partners, and cross-functional peers.
• Represent engineering in strategic conversations, advocating for technical needs while deeply understanding business and user impact.
• Promote transparency and shared understanding through clear documentation, inclusive decision-making, and regular syncs.

Leadership & Team Management

• Develop and retain top engineering talent; provide clear growth paths and mentorship that supports both individual aspirations and team needs.
• Foster a high-performance, inclusive, and collaborative team culture rooted in trust, feedback, and shared ownership.
• Conduct thoughtful performance reviews, promote continuous learning, and ensure engineers thrive through regular coaching and development opportunities.

Technical Expertise

• Ability to translate product briefs into executable technical plans, including identifying milestones, dependencies, and risks.
• Strong architectural thinking across backend, frontend, and infrastructure — with a focus on system design and tradeoff analysis rather than hands-on coding.
• Skilled at evaluating multiple approaches and articulating rationale in plain language for both technical and non-technical partners.
• Experience guiding teams through ambiguity and making pragmatic decisions that balance speed, quality, and scalability.
• Familiarity with modern web technologies (e.g. Node.js, Rails, React, GraphQL, cloud infrastructure) is useful, but depth of coding skill is less important than the ability to set direction, review proposals, and ensure technical soundness.

Target Experience

• Engineering Leadership: 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams.
• Software Development: 4+ years of hands-on experience as a full-stack, web-focused, software engineer.
• 0 -> 1 Experience: Created teams or products from scratch, worked in early-stage startups or newly-minted business lines.
• Tech Stack: 3+ years working in at least one of our core languages: Ruby or JavaScript/Typescript — alongside strong proficiency in React and modern frontend best practices.
• Infrastructure: Experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS.
• API Design: Experience developing RESTful APIs and GraphQL endpoints.
• NICE TO HAVE: Experience with running feature experiments, multi-armed bandits + growth optimization experience (A/B testing).

Key Skills/Competency

• Engineering Management
• AI Workflow Scaling
• Product Execution
• Team Leadership
• Technical Architecture
• Experimentation & A/B Testing
• Ruby/JavaScript/Typescript
• React & Frontend Best Practices
• AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
• GraphQL & RESTful APIs